Creation of the Universe

By Carman Bradley

Einstein once asked the question, ‘How much choice did God have in
constructing the Universe?’ - If the no-boundary proposal is correct, he
had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions. He would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the
laws that the Universe obeyed. This,
however, may not really have been all that much of a choice; there may well be
only one, or a small number of complete unified theories…Even if there is only
one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the
equations and makes a Universe for them to describe?...Why does the universe go
to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it
brings about its own existence?[i]

Stephen
Hawking

A no-boundary
model of the Universe ‘really underlies science because it is really the
statement that the laws of science hold everywhere.’ However, if the Universe is self-contained, do we not need to
explain how it got there in the first place. Stephen Hawking’s answer is that
we do not – ‘It would just BE.[ii]

Moses said to God, ‘Suppose I go to the
Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you’ and
they ask me, ‘What is his name?’’ ‘Then
what shall I tell them?’ God said to
Moses, ‘I am who I am! This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has
sent you.’…’This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered
from generation to generation.’

Exodus 3:13-15

In answer to the question, ‘Who do you think
you are?’ Jesus replied: ‘If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is
the one who glorifies me. Though you do
not know Him, I know Him. If I said I
did not, I would be a liar…I tell you the truth before Abraham was born, I am!

John 32-58

Ironically, most “science-based” authors like
Richard Dawkins, well grounded in the wisdom of physics, reductionism,
evolution, and holding vehemently to an anti-Christian worldview, stop short of
explaining how our universe came into existence. How can the supposedly soundsteady-state
model of the universe, which assumed away a moment of creation, would offer
less of a cognitive flaw. Like a belief
of faith from the Apostle’s Creed to a Christian, the scientific community
clings to their own founding tenet, proclaimed by Stephen Hawking - the
Universe “would just BE.” In layman’s
terms this is the equivalent of saying “we do not know how things got started,
but we’re not concerned. Just accept
the creation moment on scientific faith (but never religious
faith!)

Is this a so-called “show-stopper”? Yes!
Nowhere do evolutionists, cosmologists or hierarchical reductionists
take their theories of mechanism, random chance, gradualism and the “blind”
laws of physics back to the very birth of our universe. Is the reality of our universe the first
accidental chance event? Who believes
this? The Big-Bang theory stops well
short of answering the question of existence and certainly does not give evidence
against God. Getting something from
nothing is still mathematically impossible and the current scientific model assumes the existence of “something”
measuring light years across at time zero.
If the universe is self-contained, how did it get here? There is a certain cognitive incoherence
when pubic schools confidently proclaim to our children an assumed miraculous
(chance?) birth of the universe, an equally marvelous (chance) start of life on
earth and an extraordinary (chance) evolution to mankind from some tree-hugging
apes, who through incremental (chance) decisions choose to forage for (chance)
hard nuts in the nearby (chance) open savannas. All of this the students are told withoutany chance
of the deliberate hand of God.
Moreover, when you come to accept the teachings of this secular
curriculum, argue many anti-Christian groups, remember the virgin birth and
bodily resurrection of one named “Jesus Christ” are preposterous
improbabilities. We may not know
absolutely how the universe was actually created or how life got started or now
humankind came into being, but we know for sure there is no Creator or
God. Indeed, the absurdity of teaching
all this evolutionary randomness to the preclusion of God, is magnified by the
fact that our constitutions, charter of rights and freedoms, oaths of
allegiance, national anthems, and in the U.S. the currency, all acknowledge the
existence of God. A lot of people are
either blind or in denial when it comes to life’s purpose.

Michael White offers a modern definition of Darwin’s
theory of evolution:

To Darwin, the individual organism is utterly
meaningless, and Darwinian evolution shows that all things are solely at the
mercy of two factors, the random shuffling and mutations of genes and the
forces of natural selection. In
Darwin’s universe there is no guiding hand inside or outside the individual
because there is no plan, no objective other than the drive for survival. Nature is mindless, ungoverned, a free
spirit, and because of this, Darwin tells us, life is cruel, violent, and
utterly meaningless. This then is a
model for all of Nature. Thomas Hobbes
touched upon this truth some two centuries earlier when he said of the human
condition (a tiny element of Nature’s grandeur) that it is ‘solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short.[iii]

Either mankind is alone (but, for the chance encounter
with another chance extraterrestrial in a chance overlap of the time-space
continuum, as Carl Sagan theorizes); or there is a God who is our Creator and
who wants to enter into a relationship with each of us. The tug-of-war over such conflicting beliefs
deserves far greater attention than most give in their lifetime. More important for the purpose of this book,
the paradigm you choose has a decisive impact on your view of GBLTQ culture and
subsequently same-sex marriage. To a
great degree the orthodox Christian’s assertion of God’s “divine condemnation”
of GBLTQ sex practices, is constrained within a context of the reader’s
willingness to accept monotheism.
Prayerfully, this chapter and the entire book will help open your eyes
to the Christian worldview.

[Note: One does not have to become a Christian or a
devoted humanist to make an informed choice between the merits of one worldview
over that of the other. Jesus Christ,
Margaret Sanger, and Charles Darwin all share a human birth; however, their
divergent life purposes and proclamations for the “way” to happiness and peace
give everyone two distinct paradigms of choice.]

Agnostics, like others who ignore God’s existence,
have a public and political advantage in society. Unlike “religious” people, they are not expected to censor their
personal beliefs in such secular milieus as public schools,
universities, courthouses and parliament.
This diminution of theism has been a humanist goal for many years. At a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869, Thomas Huxley invented the term
agnostic as a play upon the Gnostics.
Here Huxley chose not just to claim “I
do not know,” but he preferred the negative view “One cannot know.” Andit is this strictly universal negative
judgment that permeates much of the scientific and academic communities.

Ironically, the evolution of science is now
contributing more to the credibility of God amongst non-believers than to the
Creator’s discredit. Regrettably most
scientists seem trapped within choices from only a non-Christian worldview: (1)
agnostic – doubting God’s tangible existence, or (2) Gnostic – acknowledging an
“unknowable deity.” Most scientists are
either ignoring God or trying to become God, but seldom are they submitting to
God. Humanism is the ultimate
anti-Christian worldview, which includes agnosticism and Gnosticism. Humanism adheres to the ancient idea that we
are our own masters and that we in a sense become God through acquired and
applied wisdom. However, logic argues
that we cannot be both creator and the created; hence the hard fought humanist
anti-Christian theory of a meaningless random universe. Lets us look first at the existence of our
universe from both paradigms.

For Christians the model for creation of the
universe, earth and humankind is found in Genesis 1 and 2. We believe God created it all and did so in
the sequence detailed in the Book of Genesis.

On the other hand, Steven Weinberg, describes the
“Big Bang” theory in The First Three
Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe.[iv] Prior to this theory, which is also called
the “standard model,” many scientists of cosmology, had hitched their beliefs
to the notion (theory) that the universe was infinite and had for all intents
and purposes existed much as seen for an eternity. In 1917, a year after the completion of his general theory of
relativity, Einstein tried to find a solution of his equations that would
describe the space-time geometry of the whole universe. Einstein looked for a solution that would be
homogeneous, isotropic, and truly static.
However, no solution could be found.
Writes Weinberg:

Einstein was forced to mutilate his equations by
introducing a term, the so-called cosmological constant, which greatly marred
the elegance of the original theory.[v]

By the late 1940s, a theory called the “steady-state
model,” was proposed by Herman Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle. With a slightly different formulation, they
proposed that the universe has always been just about as it is now. As it expands, new matter is continually
created to fill up the gaps between galaxies.[vi] Here, the problem of the early universe is
banished; there simply was no early universe.
Today, according to Weinberg, the prevailing theory is the standard
model, which can be described as follows:

In the beginning there was an
explosion. Not an explosion like those
similar on earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf
more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred
simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning, with every
particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle. ‘All space’ in this context may mean either
all of an infinite universe, or all of a finite universe which curves back on
itself like the surface of a sphere.
Neither possibility is easy to comprehend, but this will not get in our
way; it matters hardly at all in the early universe whether space is finite or
infinite.

At about one-hundredth of a second, the
earliest time about which we can speak with any confidence, the temperature of
the universe was about a hundred thousand (10¹¹) degrees Centigrade. This is much hotter than in the center of
even the hottest star, so hot, in fact, that none of the components of ordinary
matter, molecules, or atoms, or even the nuclei of atoms, could have held
together. Instead, the matter rushing
apart in this explosion consisted of various types of so-called elementary
particles, which are the subject of modern high-energy nuclear physics.[vii]

Says Weinberg:

The standard model sketched above is not the most
satisfying theory imaginable of the origin of the universe.…there is
embarrassing vagueness about the very beginning, the first hundredth of a
second or so. Also, there is the
unwelcome necessity of fixing initial conditions, especially the initial
thousand-million-to-one ratio of photons to nuclear particles. We would prefer a greater sense of logical
inevitability in the theory.[viii]

Can we really be sure of the standard model? Will new discoveries overthrow it…or even
revive the steady-state model?
Perhaps. I cannot deny a feeling
of unreality in writing about the first three minutes as if we really know what
we are talking about.[ix]

Using the Hubble constant of 15 kilometers per
second per million light years, the age of the universe must be less than
20,000 million years.[x] Previously (1930-40), the Hubble constant
was believed to be 170 kilometers per second per million light years, which
predicted a universe of 2,000 million years or less. But this calculation conflicted with radioactivity studies by Lord
Rutherford, which indicated the earth was much older; it is now thought to be
about 4,600 million years old. Says
Weinberg:

It may be that the removal of the age paradox by the
tenfold expansion of the extragalatic distance scale in the 1950s was the
essential precondition for the emergence of the big bang cosmology as a
standard theory.[xi]

The strongest support for the “Big Bang” cosmology
comes from the confirmation that the universe is expanding and the measurement
of the cosmic microwave radiation background discovered in 1965.[xii] Weinberg explains in more detail the early
start:

Eventually, as we look farther and
farther back into the history of the universe, we come to a time when the temperature
was so high that collisions of photons with each other could produce material
particles out of pure energy….Therefore, in order to follow the course of
events at really early times, we are going to need to know how hot the universe
had to be to produce large numbers of material particles out of the energy of
radiation, and how many particles were thus produced.[xiii]

...The temperature of the universe is 100,000
million degrees Kelvin (10¹¹ ºK). The
universe is simpler and easier to describe than it ever will be again. It is filled with an undifferentiated soup
of matter and radiation.[xiv]

It is natural to ask how large the
universe was at the very early times.
Unfortunately we do not know, and we are not even sure that this
question has meaning….the universe may well be infinite now, in which case it
was infinite at the time of the first frame, and always was infinite. On the other hand, it is possible that the
universe now has a finite circumference, sometimes estimated to be about 125
thousand million light years….this gives a first-frame circumference of about
four light years. None of the details
of the story of cosmic evolution in the first few minutes will depend on
whether the circumference of the universe was infinite or only a few light years.[xv]

The Law of Energy Conservation is an empirical law
of science, also known as the First Law of Thermodynamics, states that while
energy can be converted from one form to another, it can neither be created nor
annihilated. According to Isaac Asimov:

It is considered the most powerful and most
fundamental generalization about the universe that scientists have ever been
able to make.[xvi]

Both scientists and Christians have grounded their
worldview in specific facts, beliefs and faith. Secularists have no difficulty believing in the “miraculous”
creation of the universe, i.e. ignoring the dictates of the First Law of
Thermodynamics. Either something came
from nothing or for a very tiny instant at the start of the standard model,
there was an egg 3-5 light years in circumference. Modern physics now confirms what Christians have known by faith
all along. There was a miraculous
creation moment.

Einstein supplied the relationship between matter
and energy[xvii] and later
the Heisenberg uncertainty principle supplied a possible relation between
energy and time. Scientists are now
quite willing to concede that a moment of creation was possible. Other evidence even dictates the necessity
of a creation. The famous Second Law of
Thermodynamics (Boltzmann/Kelvin) establishes that the universe must not have
always existed or it would have run down to dead stop before now.[xviii] Hubble’s correlation between red shifts and
distances to stars, and the consequent rate of expansion for the universe, even
indicates a rough estimate for the time of its creation.[xix]

Atheists will attempt to
present the moment of creation as if it were a completely “random accident” –
one which, by “lucky coincidence,” started a chain reaction of cause and effect
that ultimately fell together into the Sistine Chapel and Marilyn Monroe among
other wonders. Those who are
uncomfortable with a moment of creation (and hence a Creator) have proposed the
hypothesis that the universe goes through endless cycles of “Big Bang” followed
by “Big Crunch” where it collapses again only to be re-exploded in a subsequent
“Big Bang.” Even if this hypothesis
proves to be true, it does not eliminate the need for a moment of creation.[xx]

[xix] Robert Jastrow, C., God and the Astronomers (New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1978), p.47. Hubble
calculated that the “Big Bang,” must have occurred about two billion years
ago. Later refinements corrected this
estimate to some fifteen billion years. Cited in Stoner, p.106.

[xx] See Weinberg, First Three Minutes, pp.153 and
154. Cited in Stoner, p.108.